The Community Resilience Reader

Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval

Daniel Lerch, Daniel Lerch

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610918619
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The sustainability challenges of yesterday have become today's resilience crises. National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. But what does that mean in practice, and how can it be done in a way that's effective and equitable? The Community Resilience Reader offers a new vision for creating resilience, through essays by leaders in such varied fields as science, policy, community building, and urban design. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working with community issues on the ground. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how resilience requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that resilience starts and ends with the people living in a community. Despite the formidable challenges we face, The Community Resilience Reader shows that building strength and resilience at the community level is not only crucial, but possible.From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for students, community leaders, and concerned citizens.

CHAPTER 1

Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience

Daniel Lerch

How do you know community resilience when you see it? I think you look for the capacity for people to not have to go through extremes … being knowledgeable and having capacity to do something, to change your circumstances.

—Doria Robinson, Urban Tilth¹

We all need a sense of community. And we all need to believe that we have agency—a sense that we can make choices that will affect our lives.

—Stuart Comstock-Gay, Vermont Community Foundation²

EFFORTS TO BUILD COMMUNITY RESILIENCE often focus on growing the capacity to “bounce back” from disruptions, like those caused by climate change. But climate change is not the only crisis we face, nor is preparing for disruption the only way to build resilience. Truly robust community resilience should do more. It should engage and benefit all community members, and it should consider all the challenges the community faces, from rising sea levels to a lack of living wage jobs. In addition, it should be grounded in resilience science, which tells us how complex systems—like human communities—can adapt and persist through changing circumstances.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

Virtually every American community is part of—and dependent on—a deeply interconnected and highly complex global civilization of nearly two hundred countries, tens of thousands of cities, and more than seven billion people. The prices we pay at the grocery store and the gas station, the investments our businesses make, the regulations our governments set, and even the weather we experience every day are potentially influenced by countless events and decisions made around the world, all to a degree that was barely conceivable just half a century ago.

Although many of the challenges our communities face would exist regardless, this global interconnection is the dominant factor of our modern world and brings us rewards and risks (neither of which are distributed equally) that we cannot ignore. If the aim of community resilience—at minimum—is to safeguard the health and well-being of people in the face of the twenty-first century’s many complex challenges, those challenges need to be understood in a global context.

At Post Carbon Institute, we organize those challenges as a set of four distinct but intertwined crises called the “E⁴” crises. They influence and multiply one another, and they manifest in myriad ways from the most local to the most global of scales. They are characterized as crises because they are pushing us toward decisive changes—tipping points that we may choose to fight, ignore, or take advantage of. The E⁴ crises do not encompass all the challenges facing humanity today, but they frame and highlight those that we feel most immediately threaten modern civilization.

1. The ecological crisis. Everything we need to survive—to have life, a society, an economy—ultimately depends on the natural world, but every ecosystem has two important limiting factors: its rate of replenishment and its capacity to deal with wastes and stress. The last two hundred years of exponential economic growth and population growth have pushed ecosystems around the world near or past these limits, with results like severe topsoil loss, freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Humanity’s “ecological footprint” is now larger than what the planet can sustainably handle, and we are crossing key boundaries beyond which human civilization literally may not be able to continue.³
2. The energy crisis. The era of easy fossil fuels is over, leading the energy industry to resort to extreme measures like tar sands mining, mountain-top removal coal mining, hydrofracturing (“fracking”) for shale gas and tight oil, and deepwater drilling. These practices come with significant costs and risks, however, and in most instances, they provide far less net energy than the conventional oil, coal, and natural gas that fueled the twentieth century.⁴ Renewable energy is a real but imperfect alternative, as it would take decades and many trillions of dollars to scale up deployment to all sectors of the economy and retrofit transportation and industrial infrastructure accordingly.⁵ Declines in the amount of affordable energy available to society threaten to create major environmental, economic, and social impacts as the twenty-first century progresses.⁶
3. The economic crisis. Our local, national, and global economies are currently structured to require constant growth, yet with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, we reached the end of economic growth as we have known it.⁷ Despite unprecedented interventions on the part of central banks and governments, economic recovery in the United States and Europe has failed to benefit the majority of citizens.⁸ The end of the age of cheap and easy energy, the vast mountains of both private and public debt that we have incurred, and the snowballing costs of climate change impacts are all forcing us into an as-yet-undefined postgrowth economic system, whether we are ready for it or not.
4. The equity crisis. Inequity has been a problem throughout recorded human history, and not least in the United States, despite its professed values of liberty and justice for all. Although social progress since the Civil War has in theory brought political enfranchisement and legal protections to almost everyone, in practice the failure to fully extend both economic opportunity and a functional social safety net—together with the failure to fully address institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice—has led to ongoing inequality of economic, social, and political power. The ecological, energy, and economic crises are together exacerbating inequality, which has become increasingly visible in the rapid concentration of wealth among the ultra-rich and in the increasing violence against people of color.

These four crises shape the many and complex challenges that communities in the United States must wrestle with in the twenty-first century.⁹

Building community resilience is an attempt to keep the community from irrevocably changing for the worse as the result of these crises and, one hopes, change the community for the better. How we go about doing this is critical to whether our efforts will succeed and last. To understand why, we need to take a close look at the concept of resilience itself.

What Is Resilience, Really?

Resilience is often thought of as the ability to withstand hard times or “bounce back” from a disaster. For example, a town devastated by a tornado is called resilient when its people and its infrastructure are able to quickly return to how things were before.

In recent years, people working on community sustainability issues have developed a more nuanced view of resilience. A commonly used approach—and the one used in this chapter—comes from the field of ecology, where resilience is understood as the ability to absorb disturbance and still retain basic function and structure, or “identity.”¹⁰ In other words, a resilient system can adapt to changes without losing the essential qualities that define what it is and what it does. For example, a maple-beech forest ecosystem might experience wildfire, drought, or infestation. If it is sufficiently resilient, however, it will recuperate from individual incidents and adapt to longer-term changes, all while keeping essentially the same species, patterns, and other qualities that define its identity of “maple-beech forest ecosystem.”

In resilience science, a community and the ecosystem it makes use of are together considered a unified social-ecological system. The system’s adaptability is a function of general characteristics like diversity, innovation, and feedback as well as its ability to cope with vulnerabilities specific to its situation and make deeper transformations if needed.¹¹ Importantly, the system is understood to be a “complex adaptive system” that is not static but is constantly adapting to change, change that is often unpredictable.¹² (For a more in-depth discussion of resilience science, see chapter 9.)

When we intervene in a system with the aim of building its resilience, we are intentionally guiding the process of adaptation in an attempt to preserve some qualities and to allow others to fade away, all while retaining the essential nature, or “identity,” of the system. Thus, resilience building necessarily starts with decisions about what we value. Of course, what a community can be said to “value” is open to interpretation and may not be agreed upon by everyone. It may even reflect ignorance and prejudice; few today would agree with racist and sexist values dominant in many US communities in the 1950s, for example. As we will see later, these core issues of equity and values make a people-centered approach to community resilience especially important.

Resilience science has mostly focused on rural communities and the natural resources they depend on, but new efforts are exploring how it can be applied to nonrural communities and their relationships not only with ecological systems but with economic and social systems as well.¹³ We might ask, for example, how a city can address complex challenges like a globalizing economy, more frequent extreme weather, rising health care costs, and uncertainty about the future mix of energy resources.

Applying resilience thinking to a modern city is not fundamentally different from applying it to a small rural community: we are simply considering a broader scope of systems because it is within that community’s power to do so. A midsized US city has billions of dollars in infrastructure and social spending to work with over multiple years, not to mention hundreds of thousands of people who can act toward various goals through their economic, civic, and social activities. (Of course, the challenge of facilitating decision making among the larger community’s competing interest groups will be more complex than in a smaller community.)

When applied to communities, resilience is sometimes spoken of as the next generation of sustainability; indeed, Post Carbon Institute’s definition of community resilience (see below) deliberately incorporates sustainability’s nested triad of environment, society, and economy. But the two concepts—resilience and sustainability—may also be understood as different frameworks for achieving the same goal: organizing how we interact with the world around us and with each other in ways that can continue indefinitely. Sustainability thinking has made important contributions to how we value and steward the resources our communities depend on, although its aspirations have proven difficult to put into meaningful practice at large scales.¹⁴ Resilience thinking offers a complement to sustainability thinking in that it is explicitly focused on the challenges of humans coexisting with ecological systems; after all, it was developed for practical use in the messy, unpredictable real world.¹⁵ As Charles Redman of Arizona State University has put it, “Sustainability prioritizes outcomes; resilience prioritizes process.”¹⁶

Resilience can be a powerful concept for communities, but why bother building resilience at the community level at all when the E⁴ crises are ultimately national and global in scale? We will see why in the next section.

Why Communities?

When people speak of a community, they mean something far more tha...